Crimson staff writer

Colton A. Valentine

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Chances are if you’re reading The Harvard Crimson, you’ve never heard of Peace Love Unity Respect. The acronym is a silly combination of sounds—a feline’s pleasure with an extra letter snuck in—and the cliché it stands for wouldn't last a minute in college classrooms. But since the ’90s, PLUR’s been a credo and a life philosophy for rave subculture. This summer it became my personal mantra. This fall I’ve decided it was Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger’s as well.

Maya Angelou once said, “you can tell a lot about a person by the way s(he) handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.” Frankly, FM thinks a playlist gives you more information. So turn on Spotify, and transport yourself across the coast as you read this week’s scrutiny.

Though I’m red-green color blind and will never understand the obsession with chromatic foliage, I hear Walden Pond is beautiful in the autumn. If you catch it on the later end of October, the drying air heightens the borders of faces or the edges of each watery ripple; everything has the sharp sense of coming into focus. Unfortunately, I went in July.

Always keenly attuned to the spiritual needs of our readers, Fifteen Minutes gazed skyward this week to assess the future. The best way to consult the oracles, we have learned, is by lounging on divans with sweet Ganymede, Zeus’s cupbearer, at our elbows.

It’s always refreshing to pick up a Crimson editorial and instead find yourself reading a brochure for Harvard; it reminds you what an idyllic place you thought your house would be. You believed you’d sit down with strangers and jump straight into metaphysics or social justice.

It was March 11, and by 2 p.m. the temperature had reached a scorching 55. The ice on the ground had turned to puddles, the birds were chirping, and the flowers were practically bursting into bloom. We suspected that Cambridge runners would be emerging from their own basement-gym hibernations and migrating back to their natural habitat: the six mile loop around the Charles.

It’s a snowstorm Saturday in Cambridge, and I’ve been hit by an unusual wave of both ennui and energy. Either the weather or some suppressed self-loathing has made me hungry to rip something to shreds. The critic rears its ugly head. My target today: Harvard’s art.

Today, it is said that there are three things every Harvard student must do before graduating: pee on the John Harvard statue, run in Primal Scream, and have sex in the Widener stacks. Yet the lore of Harvard's "Three Things" only developed recently, with nude primal scream being unheard of just 20 years ago.

Three years later, it’s hard to recognize those freshmen who'd never played rugby in the women who played on a National Championship-winning squad in 2011, guided their team to varsity status over the past two years, and recently won their first Ivy League Championship.

Recently, Harvard announced the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship in honor of the acclaimed rapper, Nas. Classics Professor Gregory Nagy teaches “The Ancient Greek Hero,” a popular course now offered on edX. This is their intersection.

Despite low voter turnout across the state, participation at the polls in Quincy House was higher than expected Tuesday, as undergraduates and other members of the community cast their ballots in the first step towards filling the congressional seat vacated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

For a pointed response to their dreams of higher education, undergraduates need look no farther than the Office of Career Services homepage. Long before extolling any benefits of a master’s or Ph.D., OCS challenges students with questions like, “Are you aware of the marketability of your degree and the job prospects following completion?” and “Are you considering graduate school as an exciting intellectual and professional challenge or is it a way to delay entering the ‘Real World’ or avoid a job search?” While these questions might seem aggressive, they address two very real concerns held by Harvard students considering advanced degrees: employability and one’s conviction in the enterprise.

After the resounding success of the now annual Harvard Sex Week, Sexual Health Education & Advocacy Throughout Harvard College, the organizers behind the event, decided that conversations about Sex should not be limited to the fall semester. Hence, Harvard’s first annual Sex Weekend; Not an average weekend for the most social of undergrads, but rather a weekend-long series of discussion about all things related to the topics of sex and gender on Harvard’s campus. FM took a look at two events on opposite sides of the gender discussion spectrum: bros and feminists.

“We have talked a bit about the vulva, which makes me kind of feel uncomfortable,” says Mason S. Hsieh ’15, chuckling with a mixture of boyish embarrassment and self-deprecation. “I don’t have one,” he continues, “but you know, it’s kind of theoretically fun.”
Such is the ostensible plight of the male enrollee in Anthropology 1882: “The Woman and the Body,” a course title that likely evokes horrifying anatomical analysis and indignant feminist angst in the male mind.